Married to the Facts; Still living the American Dream

29042011

Banned in Marshfield

By the time you read this, it will all be over.

Those who were interested in the event will have enjoyed their day and had a smile on their face. The canapes will have been served and the street parties to celebrate the joyous occasion will continue long after those involved have turned their attention to the next important decision to be made. For the rest of us, life will go on much as it did before but the fact is that nothing has really changed.

Coin-operated video games are still banned in Marshfield, Massachusetts.

Twenty-nine years of a town not being able to get a Pac-Man fix or even to play a round of golf on Golden Tee. Nearly thirty years of gamers having to invest in their own gaming consoles if they want to play video games. An entire generation of children that has grown-up not knowing the joy of standing in front of a cabinet-style arcade game and feeding coins just for 5 minutes of digital pleasure.

That makes me sad.

At the town meeting on Monday, residents of Marshfield voted to keep the town a game-free zone with a total of 1,209 concerned citizens being split 655-554 in favor of enforcing a ban that has been in existence since 1982.

And this is one reason why I love living in this country. A ban on coin-operated video games is important enough to be voted upon at an annual Town Meeting and it gets coverage in the local media. Throw in the continued discussions about whether President Obama was actually born in this country and you start to realize that however much you try to look for alternative viewpoints, the American media has enough on it’s plate just keeping up to date with local/national matters.

It is no wonder that for most Americans events in the Middle East or in Europe are just images beamed into their living rooms. Foreign affairs are exactly that, things that happen to other people that should have no real bearing on how America works. To some citizens the rising price of oil has nothing to do with the continued problems in Libya or the attempts to introduce democracy in countries under autocratic rule but it may be a plot by the Socialist/Maoist/Communist-loving President to start introducing electric cars and forcing individuals to strap a wind turbine to their heads.

And the guy might not even have been born in the USA – Donald Trump believed it, so it must be true!

This week, there has been unhealthy attention on the production of Obama’s full birth certificate. Even the man himself was forced to comment on this “continued silliness” and he hoped that now the “Birthers” (as they are so charmingly known) will leave the discussion alone and start thinking about something else. They did – they started looking for evidence in the document that it might be fake.

What is the problem with these people? Why are they so determined to prove that a democratically elected President, who probably went through so many screening sessions that it makes an additional pat-down at an Airport look like a free massage, was born somewhere else?

How about the fact that the country is in debt to the tune of $1.4 trillion? What about the continued conflict in Afghanistan? Have they not realized that the Republican Party is struggling to find a candidate that may appeal to the floating voter that can challenge Obama in 2012? Are they just concerned with who wins American Idol?

Don’t get me wrong. I love living in America. When I first started writing this blog, I revealed that it had taken me 28 years to finally realize my dream of a life in the Land of the Free. I have been here nearly two years and the honeymoon isn’t over, this is a great country and people should be proud to be American.

Barrack Obama II is American. It is a Fact. End of Story.

Coin-operated video games are still banned in Marshfield, Massachusetts. Also a Fact.

And across the ocean, in a small ceremony attended by close friends and family, an unassuming young man from Windsor married his college sweetheart. But nobody really paid much attention to that Foreign Affair.